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‘THERE YOU ARE, SON. Look at that. It’s what the poor man throws away and the rich man puts in his pocket.’ Bill James and Les, his friend and neighbouring farmer, looked at one another and laughed. The three of us were leaning on a gate, having a cigarette in the middle of the morning. I had just blown my nose and, in response to my precious middle-class practice of using a handkerchief, Bill had pinched his nose tightly between his fingers and shot a magnificent stream of snot from it onto the ground at our feet. I realised what he meant, and also laughed. The next time I was alone in a field, I tried it myself. It was a complete and messy disaster, every time. Bill was also curious about my wearing glasses. He didn’t, and had never considered the need for them, mainly gazing into the middle distance across the fields as he did. I got my own back, I think, when he asked me ‘Do you keep them on when you’re asleep, son?’ I replied ‘No, I don’t, Bill, because when you’re asleep there’s nothing to look at. Your eyes are closed.’ ‘Ah,’ said Bill. Les chuckled softly.

 

Between the end of my school career in summer 1957, which I wasn’t particularly sorry to conclude, and the moment of leaving home, I’d been working for Bill, a local farmer. He paid me £2 a week for doing a remarkable variety of odd jobs from nine to five every weekday. Bill was there in the Social Club bar on my last night. Just before he left to go home, he sidled quietly up beside my father whom he always most respectfully called ‘Mr Brown’, shook hands with me and said ‘Good luck, son.’ Inside the handshake, he palmed me a folded ten-shilling note.

 

Bill’s mixed farm was about a mile north of the village of Eccleshall. It occupied sixty acres at the Sturbridge crossroads, bounded there by the road to Coldmeece and Yarnfield and by the little road that led down to Chebsey a few miles to the southeast. Chebsey isn’t far from Shallowford where Isaak Walton lived for a few years in the early 1660s and his cottage is still there as a ‘heritage’ attraction. Place names nearby include Walton, Walton Hall, Waltonbank and Waltonhurst. Les’s farm was much the same size as Bill’s, standing opposite on the other side of the Chebsey road. The crossroads had a cottage or two on each corner except for the one that was Bill’s land. I passed by this small corner of North Staffordshire again in 2007: it was practically unchanged over forty years on. There’s no sign whatever of developments of ‘Quality Homes’ or blocks of ‘Luxury Apartments’. The crossroads looks exactly as it did then and the surrounding landscape remains a patchwork of very small fields. Bill’s farmyard has one or two newer buildings in it, and the whole place looks cleaner and neater than it did during the late Fifties. Seeing it again makes me wonder which member of his large family is now in charge and what changes they’ve made. For any noticeable development on the ground since that time, you look a bit further east for the M6 motorway speeding past. This particular patch appears to have been left completely untouched.

 

The farm had two dozen black and white cows whose milk went off to Cadbury’s each morning on a lorry in silver churns. This small herd wasn’t TT (tuberculin-tested) and apparently this didn’t matter if its milk was going straight into the manufacturing process. However else Bill managed to make any money, the monthly cheque from Cadbury’s was his bread and butter. There were some sheep too, but not many. There wasn’t very much or very many of anything on a farm of this size but it didn’t want for variety. There was certainly a pig being fattened for Christmas. Bill grew a large field of potatoes, a few fields of grain crops and the sugar beet, another little banker. His wife Iris looked after the chickens and their eggs and the regular bearing of children. There was also a small pheasant project. Bill constructed a pen on the grass behind the farmhouse, and put some female pheasants in it. In theory, when the birds started their daily shouting early in the morning, male pheasants would be attracted and fly towards them from all over the surrounding countryside. Bill would be leaning out of his bedroom window, popping them off with his shotgun as they came over.

 

I must have started with him in September 1957. He took me on really to help with the sugar beet harvest but, while waiting for that to begin, thought I might as well be made useful in any way I could. He showed me how to do things for the first time and then supervised from a considerable distance, usually the warm farm kitchen. In the following five months I did a great many things I’d never done before and had never dreamed of doing at all. For the first time in my life, I touched cows and their udders, and drove them in and out of the milking shed. I did bits of hedging and ditching, fence mending, cleaning out a chicken house thick with droppings that hadn’t been touched for years. ‘Can I drag it all out with a rake or something, Bill?’ ‘No, you can’t do that, son. The only way is to get right inside there, break the crust, and then scrape it all off the perches and off the floor. It’s only shit. Then you’ve got to shovel it all out. I want it all nice and clean. We’re going to put a few turkeys in there when you’ve done.’

 

On the very cold mornings from November onwards, when the frost was hard on the fields and the puddles down the lane were solid, Iris asked me to break the ice on the chickens’ water troughs before I did anything else. Some were kept just behind the house but most of them were across two fields, living in an old double-decker bus by the hedge. When I got back from the bus, Bill would summon me into the kitchen and make us both a cup of coffee before I started my day’s work. As soon as Iris had gone into the front room to read the paper, Bill stood on a chair and reached up to the hidden ledge on top of the old dresser. He brought down a bottle of rum and poured a good stiffener into our cups. ‘Only when it’s really cold, son.’

 

Working on Bill James’s farm brought me my first experience of rubbing up against a large family. My parents and I were all I’d known of an immediate family and many of my school-friends were only children. We were a nuclear family with one dog and well below the national average for number of children. Bill and Iris had four kids at this time and I think there was another one coming. Young Tommy was about three and the eldest, the increasingly pretty Sally, was about fifteen. She responded occasionally to a bit of teasing and chasing around the back garden but it never developed into anything beyond innocent ticklings. My relative timidity was probably as much responsible for this as anything else.

 

Bill and Iris also acted as foster parents to the four children of Iris’s sister. All these youngsters meant that Bill hardly ever had to take on extra help on the farm, except for something seasonal like potato picking or sugar beet pulling. In normal times, all these kids would come home from school together, change into their work clothes immediately and disperse all over the place on their allotted tasks. I think I got on with them all well enough and, though only on the fringe of it, I was excited at being almost part of this buzzing crowd, belonging to something much bigger than most families, where the rules were – and needed to be – very different from life at my house. Because they were so many, any single child was only rarely in the spotlight, which is where you always are if you’re an only child. I know they thought I was a bit odd because I didn’t have a North Staffordshire accent, because I’d been to the Grammar School and because, to start with, I was apprehensive about getting too close to the beasts on the farm. Being a bit older than any of them may have helped. By the time I’d finished there, I’d done most if not all of the things they did, including plucking dead but still warm and twitching pheasants and chickens and shoving my right arm up inside a cow’s backside as far as my shoulder.

 

Bill’s relationship with the modern world of the late 1950s was mixed. When I knew him, he’d never travelled on a train in his life. Conversely, he had the telephone and bought a new Ford Consul every two years. He’d never taken a driving test, so he didn’t drive it himself. He drove the tractor but never on the road. Iris would drive the Consul when necessary during the day. Les, who could drive but didn’t seem to have a car of his own, would drive it most evenings to take himself and Bill to the Club for a few pints. He also took Bill to Stafford market every couple of months, where they would meet other farmers, gaze knowingly but briefly at a few cows in a pen and retire to the pub for the rest of the afternoon.

 

They did take one significant step towards modernity while I worked there, by getting onto the main sewerage system, unofficially. The sewage pipe serving our community on the other side of the crossroads ran across one of Bill’s fields, conveniently not too far from the farmhouse. Bill knew the exact line of the pipe. One autumn weekend he got hold of old Ted Plant, who lived in one of the Sturbridge cottages, put him down the manhole and told him to dig a trench from the house to the main pipe and connect them up. When old Ted’s head eventually emerged again from the trench, the pipes had been laid and the job was done. From that day on, the James family had a flushing lavatory without the annoyance of having to pay higher water rates for it.

 

One morning Bill declared the opening of the sugar beet harvest, my main job. He put a machete thing in my hand and took me to the long, narrow isosceles triangular field. He opened the field gate: ‘There you are, son. It’s all yours’. I’ve since seen gigantic sugar beet fields on the East Anglian Fens reaching almost to the horizon in every direction. This much smaller field of Bill’s felt just like that, with little me standing by the gate, realising that I had to pull every single one of them out of the ground with my bare hands and cut their tops off. ‘Pull ‘em out in twos, son, then bang ‘em together to get some of the dirt off. Then you do this.’ Bill banged them together, dropped one onto the ground beside him and sliced off the top of the other one with a single stroke of the machete. Then he bent down, speared the other one with the hooks on the end of the machete, and tossed it up in the air a little so that it came down in exactly the right position on his outstretched hand. One slice, the top was off and the beet joined its fellow as the beginning of a pile that I was going to create.

 

He gave me the machete and I repeated the process, slowly and uncertainly. I could see from the way he’d done it that you could soon develop a simple rhythm, but there was nothing simple or rhythmic about the way I went about it. For a start, they didn’t just come out of the ground. You had to get a firm grip on the stalks of the leaves, pull them hard, and then one would come out more readily than the other. This meant using both hands to get the second one out. Banging the soil off and dropping one of them was the easy bit. Tossing a single sugar beet in the air and making it come down the right way wasn’t easy at first. Nor was holding it carefully while you attacked it gingerly with the machete. In the time it took me to deal with two sugar beets, Bill or any of the kids would be halfway up the row. Bill didn’t mind. ‘You’ll soon get used to it. Work up your speed a bit as you go along. There’s no hurry. But mind your fingers.’ With that, he was off back to the kitchen, leaving me with what seemed like infinite acres of sugar beet to pull.

 

Now I knew what this farm work was really all about. It could be hard, it could be boring, and it appeared to be endless. Eventually, I did manage to get faster at it and gradually came to feel slightly proud of my growing heap of beet. Once I’d got going, Bill never came near me. I just went to the field every morning after my coffee and got on with it. On cold ‘rum-in-coffee’ mornings, the leaf stalks were stiff with frost and my fingers first ached and then went numb as I pulled and pulled. The harder the frost, the more the beets resisted. The galling thing was coming back to it on Monday mornings. During the weekends, all the kids had spent most of their spare time pulling ‘my’ sugar beet. The pile that I’d been so pleased with on Friday afternoon had quadrupled in size as Bill’s team of child-slaves had waded through the field from one end to the other and back again. Still, it meant I could begin to see the end of the job, and when it was finished, I got the treat, riding with Bill in the cab of the hired lorry, driven by Les, taking the crop to the sugar factory at Wellington.

 

The autumn days passed into winter. When I knew Bill and Iris were out for the day, I got the tractor out and charged all over the fields at higher than normal speeds. I hitched up the trailer and took kale out to the cows. One day, while I was trimming some heavy branches that had been sawn from a standing tree, the felling axe glanced off a branch into the big toe of my right foot. I kept quiet about that – worried, as so often, that I’d be told off - and, once back home, strapped my toe tightly together with Elastoplast and allowed natural processes to heal it. It hurt for weeks and I had to limp around surreptitiously. No one said anything. I broke the ice, collected eggs, dug out blocked ditches, helped with the milking, plucked dead birds and eventually finished cleaning out the old chicken house. When the brewer’s grains arrived, I got inside the storage silo with Bill to tread them down. Like several of the other jobs I did, that one sent me home reeking of yet another pungent and unusual odour.

 

Christmas approached and with it the day for killing the pig. The first chapter of Flora Thompson’s memoir Lark Rise, published in the year I was born, provides one of the classic accounts in our literature of the central importance of the family pig in rural life. In her hamlet, virtually every cottage had a lean-to pig sty and the pig was ‘everybody’s pride and everybody’s business’. Her mother spent hours boiling waste food to supplement the pig’s expensive diet of barley meal, rather as my grandmother in East Dulwich was always boiling up a big pan full of whiting for her succession of pet cats. On the way home from school, the Lark Rise children would pick thistles and dandelion or collect snails from the hedgerows in a pail to help the fattening. According to local lore, the execution ‘had to take place some time during the first two quarters of the moon; for, if the pig was killed when the moon was waning, the bacon would shrink in cooking’.

 

I don’t know whether Bill James followed that wisdom with his pig. A bloke who had some other job in the daytime was booked to come round one evening with the humane killer. This was a pistol that shot a bolt into the pig’s forehead and killed it instantly. Working on the farm, I’d gone way beyond the earlier boundaries of my experience and knew I had to see the pig business. But it was rather like those nightmares when you know the next door you open will have something horrible behind it, and yet you’re compelled to open it and go in. Bill told me to sit in a corner of the kitchen out of the way. The workers, Bill, Les and the older boys, needed all the space they could get and had to work fast. In other words, this was one job that didn’t have a place for a greenhorn like me. That was fine. It was the one job I didn’t at all mind leaving to somebody else.

 

When the kitchen was ready with loads of boiling water and a selection of special hand tools, they brought the pig in. It wasn’t too keen and it needed all of them to hold it while the shooting was done. Flora Thompson was born in 1876 and her childhood description is very close to what happened in Bill’s kitchen eighty years later:

 

The killing was a noisy, bloody business, in the course of which the animal

was hoisted to a rough bench that it might bleed thoroughly and so preserve

the quality of the meat. The job was often bungled, the pig sometimes getting

away and having to be chased; but country people of that day had little sympathy

for the sufferings of animals, and men, women, and children would gather round

to see the sight.

 

After the carcass had been singed, the pig-sticker would pull off the detachable

gristly, outer coverings of the toes, known locally as ‘the shoes’, and fling them

among the children, who scrambled for them, then sucked and gnawed them,

straight from the filth of the sty and blackened by fire as they were.

 

The whole scene, with its mud and blood, flaring lights and dark shadows, was

as savage as anything to be seen in an African jungle.

 

We had the humane killer instead of the pig-sticker but I can see someone stabbing the pig’s throat to release the blood while it was still on the stone kitchen floor, which they were constantly sweeping with water to flush the blood away. Squealing had given way to erratic twitching, eventually to stillness and the dead weight of a very fat pig. The ‘shoes’ were wrenched out by one of the boys but the other kids weren’t interested in them. The biggest prize was the pig’s head and little Tommy was in line for this. They didn’t singe the skin but sloshed boiling water on it and then worked incredibly fast to scrape the bristles off the whole body. It was the same principle as plucking a chicken while the flesh was still warm.

 

After the scraping, the carcass was hung upside down from a hook on the kitchen wall. I think I’d imagined that this was the end of it and that I could relax. It wasn’t. Somebody cut the head off and gave it to Tommy, who, with the pig’s blood dripping down his front, walked round showing it to everyone, shouting proudly ‘I got the head! I got the head!’ ‘Well, don’t bring it in here,’ yelled Iris from the more civilised warmth of the front room. Then came what I found the least attractive part of the whole performance. The hanging carcass was slit right down the belly from tail to neck, releasing the great flopping bundle of guts and entrails and the weirdest of all repulsive smells, utterly unlike anything I’d ever smelt before. The kitchen floor was awash with blood, bits of pig’s insides and other bodily fluids. I’ve no idea how long this whole thing took, but several people were working non-stop at high speed all the time. And then it was done. The pig hung there over night and Iris and Bill got going the next day, exactly as Flora’s family and neighbours had done, cutting up the joints of pork, putting a few aside for close friends and for anyone, like Les and the gun man, who’d helped. I remember taking a joint home to my parents and, very brave now that I’d come through this rite of passage, offering to give my mother a blow-by-blow account of the pig killing. She thought she could probably manage without it.

 

The thing that struck her was how much I’d enjoyed working on the farm. It was different and engrossing, and it had engaged parts of me in fulfilling ways that being at school and living our kind of more sedentary, more indoor, life never had. I felt stretched in several ways, getting messages from departments of my mind and body that hadn’t spoken to me previously. For four months or so, I’d been doing new, sometimes strange, things, getting along and working with people quite outside my conventional middle-class cocoon. I was so enthusiastic about it that she even suggested that I should perhaps think about going to agricultural college and making it my life.

 

Reflecting on it now, I entirely appreciate her motives for she was always deeply concerned for my well being in so many ways. At this uncertain stage of my life, she would naturally see this as another possibility for me and my future. The very positive fact of my enthusiasm for something must have had an effect. However, I’m sure I didn’t see it as anything quite as serious as the first step towards a lifelong career. I suspect that, in my perception at the time, it had been a very stimulating and almost completely enjoyable few months, a good experience, like the contemporary gap year between school and university. It had filled the time before I left home for the big city, and the effort had brought its small rewards.

 

LAST WORD The way our lives develop is largely accidental. Working on

the farm was a pivotal moment and if I’d decided differently then, the whole

of the rest of my life, necessarily, would also have been very different.

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